Chilli guys

Sriracha fans - listen up! These 2 guys, Tomas and Nerijus, are making a hot sauce to die for. However, in their own words: making the sauce is easy, building a business not so much. What it takes to turn your hobby into a profession? We sit down to taste & talk.

What was the hardest in getting the product ready? 

You’d think the hardest thing is to get the recipe right! Nah. Sure, we spent a lot of time working on it, and it was really fun, however starting the actuall business is totally the hardest thing.

Getting all the permits from the governmental institutions was a very long and taxing ordeal. It tested our patience and our motivation to continue. In the end though, we survived.

Knowing what we know now, we’d recommend gettin all the paperwork and permits in the first place, because that trully is the real challenge.

Sure - figuring out the packaging, branding, social media presence was also pretty hard, but we’ve been expecting it, and had no illusions about it being easy.

All in all, be ready for a proper amount of confusion. You can make it through!

You’re so new, is it tough to get into shops and supermarkets? 

Hot sauce is still quite a novelty food item, especially outside the major cities in Lithuania. Lithuanian cuisine is based around earthy flavors or flavors that don’t pair all that well with hot sauce. Think of potato pancakes – you’d hardly want any hot sauce on that, would you?

Lucky to us (and to all Lithuania food lovers), Lithuanian food scene is on the rise. Mexican food trucks, ramen shops, Dutch pancakes, Thai food and etc. – it’s all over the place now. We have competing brands for Kombucha, craft beer and whatnot.

People are discovering hot sauce now and we can see some imported sauces appearing on the shelves, which is great. There are more and more options to spice things up in the restaurants.

If you like to eat spicy – think 10 years ago, there was nothing at all in Lithuanian grocery stores. There was horseradish, Tabasco, chilli ketchup and maybe some chilli paste. Now, you can go and buy BBQ sauce with Ghost Pepper in it!

That said, it is pretty hard to get into shops as it is a new product. To add, there was never a Lithuanian hot sauce brand. Firstly, we are focusing on smaller businesses, specialty food stores and restaurants/takeaways, where the food pairs with our sauces. This way, we can share our passion with our target audience.

Big supermarkets include a lot of Terms & Conditions with their supplier contracts and the payment scheme is very much in their favor - we’re too small for that.

 Is it expensive to start a business? 

It really depends on what are you doing.

We are a tiny bootstrapped company and we’d build everything in the farm ourselves from mostly recycled materials. We did rent all the equipment possible to keep our costs low. Since we deal with low volumetric quantities, we can manage a lot at our cooking/bottling sessions and we don’t need any special transport or anything like that.

It is very expensive in terms of time. Watering, weeding, pruning, taking care of all the plants, that’s where it gets expensive and weekends go away.

Do you have a business plan or do you just test and see what works? 

We do have a plan, it all depends on how much time we spend following it. We’d had some good guidance along the way. We are trying not to run ahead of ourselves.

Are you looking for investment? 

Not at the moment – it’s too early for that.

What worked for you marketing wise? 

We believe that our story and love for organic farming helped us to get in touch with our followers. We’ve grown our community organically. So far, we’ve been present only in social media, but you’ll see us live in events soon enough! We are dying to meet and greet our fans and to say hi to new people and taste some sauce together.

Starting something is so wonderful, but it can be really tough and exhausting, leading to burnouts even. How has it been for you?  

Hobby turning business is always stressful. It’s a test for the friendship as well, as we have to govern each other, establish business rules and discipline and meet our individual goals.

In the very beginning, everything is on the up – new community, attention, but everybody plateaus one way or the other. It is important to keep your motivation up, get some rest and start grinding again.

We remember times, where mixing up two locations to send the sauces, or burning 100 bottles worth of sauce made us want to give up, as it seemed the end of the world.

It’s not. And it will happen again for sure.

We love these guys, and we love their stuff. So we asked for a discount code, to get 5% off, type in WPD? at the checkout. Head over to chilliguys.lt